Speech Recognition Software: Does It Work?

While all eyes were focused on the introduction of Apple iPhone’s Siri voice recognition software, Amazon quietly bought a voice recognition company called Yap. Yap is the brainchild of a small Charlotte based startup that had been beta testing its product when, in September 2011, Amazon entered the picture and bought the company. What is surprising about this is that neither company made a public statement about the purchase, leaving some to believe that Amazon wanted to keep the purchase a secret.

I believe that this purchase was a smart move on Amazon’s part since speech recognition software is now one of the hottest products on the market. These programs extend to use on smart phones allowing texting to become a non-typing event. to learn more about my experience with the use of this software, you can refer to my article about the VLingo Android application that I use on my personal smart phone.

In the article I tackle the issue as to why VLingo, which may lack the polish and feature richness of Siri, is able to provide a reasonable experience for Android users while remaining free at the Android Market.

So just how good is any of this speech recognition software and how well does it function?

For the most part, speech recognition software works very well; it is just that the user needs to understand how it works. The problem appears to be that many people believe that for the program to work, they need to speak robot-like or over-enunciate their words, which is exactly the wrong way to use the software effectively.

Another problem that occurs, which happens to me, is that we fail to think about what we are going to say before we say it. This causes us to stop or stutter, to which the software reacts accordingly, resulting in it inserting incorrect text. To solve this problem I have found it most helpful to speak naturally, which has resulted in a higher percentage of words being correctly recognized.

In addition, you should know the limitations of your voice recognition software, which means you should practice with the software to give it a better recognition of your speech patterns. Or maybe I should have said that the more you practice, the better you will get in speaking properly so that the speech recognition software works the best it can for you. Give it a try and see what you think.

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